Ukraine and the world hit by malware deranging the banking system

27 June 2017

Massive hack attack was arranged today on Ukrainian financial institutions with a number of banks experiencing difficulties with the provision of their usual services such as card acceptance and payment processing, as reported by the country’s central bank. It was supposedly a ransomware attack that affected many organizations and companies across the globe apart from Ukraine.

Customers wrote on their social media pages that Kiev metro did not accepted card payments and drivers could not pay for the fuel at the pumping stations.

Apart from Ukrainian banking system, such global companies as Denmark-based Maersk, Rosneft oil producer and British WPP were also hit by the attack. According to the preliminary reports, the cyberattack involved some version of ‘Petya’ ransomware, while later update from Kaspersky Lab disconfirmed the assumptions telling that the hack was orchestrated with the use of some new malware type.

The malware plague comes just several weeks after over 300 thousand addresses globally were affected by the WannaCry, when the scale of disaster covered governmental bodies, large corporations and banking institutions.

Allan Liska, an intelligence architect at Recorded Future, notes that this looks like ‘a multi-prolonged’ hacking attack which started with a simple phishing campaign that infected the infrastructure across Ukraine. He adds that Loki Bot may also be involved in the incident, and it means that in addition to making the affected equipment inoperable, the malware could have stolen some sensitive information.